Anyone working in a Utility Company?

Foxh0und

Anyone here who works on a utility company? does your company practice neutral high(neutral on top of the phase conductors) in distribution system?

mtb856

I work for a utility in the South. As far as you question goes, I'm not an expert on our distribution lines (I work in substation protective relaying), but I would say most of the lines I see have the neutral above the phase wires. I believe we do that for lightning reasons, from what others have told me in the past. If you had a specific question I can try to answer it, although someone else might be more knowledgeable than me on the subject.

-Aaron

dlgoff

Interesting and very necessary area of work. I wish I would had learned more about it while working in the SCADA area.

mtb856

I actually worked in that area for 4 years as well, very fun and interesting. I worked at the slave side, getting all the substation equipment working with the RTU and testing with the SCADA front end at our headquarters.

Like you said though, I wanted to see the rest of the substation so I moved to our relaying group for more experience.

What area of SCADA did you work in?

Foxh0und

Thanks Aaron! what is the name of you utility company? is it possible to know your standard specifications & procedures when installing the neutral wire?

dlgoff

Economic Dispatch and Generation Control software and hardware for the Energy Management System. Basically I engineered the RTU hardware interfaces for the utility company area's 5 power plants (IIRC, back then there were 12 generator interfaces) and 15 tie-line subs. The software aspect involved determining and inputting the generator/substation database, system impedance matrices at different loads (used to determine which generator is most economical to ramp), and the graphics interface for the dispatch operators.

And all the fun involved with tuning so not to bring the grid down.

mtb856

I work for Alabama Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company. As far as the specifications, I'm going to have to apologize and say that I wouldn't even know who to ask for that. My only interaction with Distribution is with the bucket truck line guys that hook the lines up to the substation, I'm not sure where the group is that handles sizing the shield wires. I will say in the past it seems that they install it after the pole support wires are connected, but before the phase conductors...but I'm not sure if that's a hard and fast rule. Sorry that I couldn't be more help.

Foxh0und

I appreciate your post, it helped me in some ways as well. I'll just try to google your company, maybe I can find manuals to download. Thanks again!